Guys, won’t you learn from experience? Tim Mahoney won his US Congressional seat after Mark Foley, the previous representative from the district in Florida, resigned. Why? The bachelor Foley had sent sexually explicit emails to congressional pages, teenage boys. Sex scandal!

Now Mahoney, 52, who came to office two years ago with the campaign slogan “Restoring America’s values begins at home,” has admitted to sexual affairs (plural), and a payoff to a former mistress.

Mahoney, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens, is, unlike Foley, married. And, although his wife, Terry, stood by him a week ago as he admitted that he had created “pain” in his marriage, she now, no surprise, wants a divorce.

Mahoney admitted paying a campaign worker and former mistress, Patricia Allen, and her lawyer $121,903 to prevent a lawsuit over sexual harassment. A second relationship was also charged: Mahoney had an affair with a Florida woman who came to Washington to get FEMA aid for a 2004 hurricane. She got a $3.4 million federal grant.

Since Tim and Terry Mahoney have been married for 22 years, and he was a wealthy venture capitalist and computer marketer before he was a Congressman, and they have a daughter, Bailey, in college, and he has already admitted to adultery, and she campaigned hard for him when he sought election, Terry would presumably get a generous settlement.

For one thing, her court papers say, obviously referring to the $121,903 payoff, Tim Mahoney “recently sold jointly owned real property,” put the proceeds into his own account, and “dissipated funds from said account.”

Those were marital assets. Her divorce petition says that she is “in need of temporary, lump sum, rehabilitative and permanent periodic alimony, which the husband is well able to provide for.”

Rep. Mahoney lists his net worth as between $3 million and $12.7 million.

With the confidence of a captain of the girls' basketball team, Sarah Palin swished her way into the office of Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, took a jump shot at being Governor of Alaska, and then slam dunked the nomination for the Republican vice presidency.

Along the way, she’s accomplished a feat that often sidelines powerful women. Throughout her impressive career, she has never made her husband look diminished.

How she has dribbled her way around this challenging issue is a subject truly worthy of debate. After all, studies in Social Forces and The Journal of Marriage and Family say that women who are more successful than their husbands have higher divorce rates.

Many powerful women have come forward to admit that their careers have sent their relationships to the bench, including Pink and Reese Witherspoon. Amy Adams in this month’s Vanity Fair says she’s looking for a guy who won’t look at her success as his failure.

Sarah Palin, however, seems blissfully unvexed. Using her arsenal of charm like a lethal weapon, she is showing America that you can be powerful and sexy at the same time. And you can keep your studmuffin by your side, looking happy.

Hillary Clinton, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel — none of these women’s relationships with their husbands conveyed much marital heat in public. The husbands were more likely to get their wives into hot water, or have been so lukewarm, no one paid any attention to them.

Now we have Todd Palin, the hot political hubby.

At campaign stops, Todd Palin looks macho while doing nothing more than standing there holding their baby.

Gov. Sarah Palin may be not be getting a wink of sleep now that an Alaska state judge allowed a probe to go forward into whether she abused her power. The Republican vice presidential nominee is under fire for pressuring Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire her ex brother-in-law, a state trooper.

The charges are that pressure to fire the trooper came from the Governor herself, her husband, Todd, and her staff. After Monegan did not agree, she fired him, citing disagreement over budget cuts.

And to her, that's a heck of a good reason and why should it be questioned otherwise?

On Thursday Judge Peter Michalski threw out the lawsuit filed by five Republican state legislators who claimed that Palin was the victim of an unfair partisan probe. The Republicans appear to be worried that a damaging report may surface before Election Day and affect voters. Or at least the kind of voters who vote based on performance.

The attorney for the five state legislators, Kevin Clarkson, claimed that the body that ordered the investigation had exceeded its authority.

But Michalski agreed with defense attorney Peter Maassen, who argued that the Legislature has broad authority to investigate the governor. The mere appearance of impropriety does not mean any individual's right to fairness was violated, Michalski wrote in his decision.

“It is legitimately within the scope of the legislature's investigatory power to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the termination (of) a public officer the legislature had previously confirmed,” the judge wrote.

Pop sensation Pink isn’t blue that she’s through with her ex-husband, the motocross biker Carey Hart. But she does blame her career. She’s not alone in feeling work drove her marriage straight into the dirt.

In an interview, Pink says, “It ‘s such a cliché when you talk about a Hollywood divorce, but the scheduling did get very hard. And it seemed that I was always the one left in charge of it. I got tired of being the Schedule Woman.”

Indeed, it can be exhausting having to juggle so much. Which is why one West Virginia University study shows that working women have a higher divorce rate and cites as a major irritant the disparity between the housework they do, and the housework their mate does.

Maybe it’s also because guys seem to have the lazy gene but when you are capably steering a demanding career, it’s not easy to come home and cater to a husband who collapses into a chair and expects burgers and beer, even if he has had a hard day being a Moto X daredevil.

She married Hart in 2006 in a celebrity-packed wedding in Costa Rica. He, now 32, was a star of “The Surreal Life” reality show and is famous for his tattoo parlors, Hart & Huntington, in Las Vegas, Cabo, and Hawaii.

When you have a career, and like Pink, you are young, successful and fun, you don’t need to put up with a guy who isn’t doing even 65 percent of his part. Financial independence does give you the ability to say, or sing, “See ya.”

In fact, that is what the 28-year-old Pink did. In a new song, she belts out the following lyrics, which could be interpreted as a slap in you-know-who’s face.

“And I don’t need you/ And guess what?/ I’m having fun.”